If A President Can Have His Money And Property Snatched By His Political Opposition, This Isn’t A Free Country And We Don’t Have Fair Elections

By Eddie Scarry, THE FEDERALIST                        22 February 2024

Matt Cohen/Flickr/CC by 2.0

America isn’t free and elections can’t be fair if a former president can be the subject of a shakedown by his political opposition.

Voters in a few months are supposed to cast a ballot for their preferred presidential candidate. Meanwhile, we just watched one of our major political parties attempt to literally bankrupt the likely nominee of the other, and seize his property.

Whatever you want to say of America anymore, it can’t possibly be called free and our elections aren’t anything close to fair.

A Democrat judge linked up with a Democrat district attorney in New York last week, ruling that Donald Trump, who earned more votes in 2020 than any sitting president in history, pay the city about half a billion dollars in penalties and fines, plus forego his right to conduct business or borrow money in the entire state. The pretext for the obscenity is that Trump in his years as a real estate developer routinely defrauded lenders by inflating the value of his assets, a hideous crime that resulted in his victims’ insolvency and buried by insurmountable debt.

Wait, that’s not right. Let me check my notes. Sorry, what actually happened is that the banks who took the risk of financing Trump’s ventures raked in fistfulls of profits and continued chasing him to continue their lucrative partnerships. In other words, the parties “wronged” by Trump got richer.

With each passing day, nearly $100,000 in interest is tacked onto the sentence and the D.A., Letitia “peek-a-boo” James (as Trump calls her for hilarious yet unknown reasons), has gone so far as to threaten state seizure of the former president’s marquee real estate properties should he fail to pay the sum.

Trump’s legal team has promised to appeal. But to do that, they would have to secure a bond that’s even higher than amount he’s been ordered to pay.

This is a former president. This is a former president who exponentially increased his support for reelection in 2020, earning 7 million more votes than any sitting president before.

This is a former president running for a non-consecutive second term and who has all but in name locked up the Republican nomination. This is a former president whose polling numbers currently show him likely to defeat the sitting one in virtually every swing state that will decide the election.

They’re taking his money — potentially all of the cash he has on hand — revoking his right to participate in an entire state’s economy, and threatening to snatch his private property. That’s just in New York. Elsewhere, Democrats are trying to keep his name off the ballot or, if that doesn’t work, put him in prison.

Trump did business in New York for decades. This isn’t a coincidence or a matter of karma catching up. James campaigned for her job promising to pursue the former president, explicitly because he became president.

If becoming president means potentially seeing your whole life’s work confiscated by the political opposition, then elections aren’t fair. This country isn’t free.